The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 12,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 20 years to get that many views.
What would your sitter do if a police officer forced entry without a warrant?
Officer Buccilli demanded to enter the home of Tim and LuAnn Batts, going so far as to stick his foot in the door and shove an 23-year-old sibling aside, threatening to arrest him and saying, “I don’t need no stinking warrant!”
When Joe stepped inside to call his policeman brother on his cell phone, Lt. Buccilli followed him. “Please don’t come in,” said Joe. “I am making a private call. You do not have permission to come in.”
Then it gets worse.
This is in the USA, friends.
The Batts are respectfully suing Lt. Buccilli.
Read more, here.
In the middle of the night at a U.N. conference in Dubai, the presiding chairman of the International Telecommunication Union conference surveyed the assembled countries to see whether there was interest in having greater involvement in the U.N. governing the Internet. A majority of countries gave their approval.
The first recorded baby shower in the world, perhaps, was when the Magi brought to Joseph and Mary, and their new baby, Jesus, three amazing gifts from their traveling treasure chests.
What? No gift card for Baby Gap? No.
Gold.
No Lysol Spray? No.
Something much nicer and much more meaningful.
No Mennen’s?
No. Something much more foretelling.
How could these three wise men have known their gifts were perfect?
Probably the same way they knew when and where to find the Babe.
They paid attention to the things of God.
We should try it.
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Image via Wikipedia
If poverty is a help to right living, then this girl was a saint.
I’ll call her “Sharon”. She lived out in the country near us, in a rental cabin meant for hunters. Termite-infested, cold in winter, hot in summer, wet during rains, it provided only privacy for Sharon’s family: her jobless parents and her little sister.
When, after my second son arrived, the carry-in meals were too much food for us, we passed some of it on to this poor family. They returned every single one of those empty Cool-Whip cartons, spotlessly clean. The only time they ever asked us for money, it was for food, and when Sharon’s mother had finished shopping, she brought me the change she had not needed.
Sharon was trying hard not to become a dropout and to keep away from the problems inherent to youth those days. It was easy for me to like her quiet and confident ways. Although there was about ten years difference in our ages, she showed me the kindnesses of friendship and sometimes would visit with me over the phone. She always ended each call by mentioning some difficulty she or her family had encountered and I counseled her briefly. Only after I converted her plight into a prayer request, would she say good-bye. How that impressed me!
Sharron married right after high school and soon was expecting her first child. She still called me occasionally and eventually asked me to visit at the new house her teen husband had built her. What a building! Constructed totally of 3/8” plywood, top to bottom, in and out, and walls painted in the latest style – with a feather duster. It was too hot in there for me, but the small wood-burner was kept at a low roar for the baby’s warmth.
One day I answered my door to find Sharon standing there with something to give me. She said they had to move and wanted to tell me good-bye. On the porch floor beside her stood a diminutive table her husband had made of scrap lumber, mostly 1×1’s. It was as simple as a plywood house, but well-made and painted with a feather duster.
How incredible that Sharon, so poverty-stricken, could even consider gifts for others! It almost brought me to tears.
I have loved the story and the person behind that small gift for a long time. It served well as a fern stand, outdoors when the weather was mild, and indoors when it was too hot or cold for ferns. It soon needed repainting and always bore the colors of the exterior of our houses, wherever we lived. I kept it proudly on display right by the front door and often told the story of this gift.
If you are thinking you’ve already read this story here, before, you’re correct. Oh, BUT – there is a new twist in the ending. Before, I had said what I thought was true, that it had finally sort of decomposed in the ensuing 30 years, but I was wrong. The little table still lives! While visiting my oldest son, not long ago, I spied it on the deck behind his house, still holding up, still holding potted plants, and I (TADA!) photographed it for you all to see: The lovely little table from “Sharon”.
Serenity
What on earth is peace on earth?
Tranquility?
We write poems about it. Is it calmness?
We take classes to learn it. Is it peacefulness?
We build our houses to achieve it. Is it quietude?
We take vacations to find it elsewhere. Is it stillness?
We even try screaming to see if we can’t get a little of it . . .
. . . “and QUIET!”
Is it composure?
Mellowness?
It’s more than the opposite of war.
Is it coolness?
Poise?
It cannot be bought for any price.
In fact, some of the poorest people possess it.
Some of the richest also possess it, along with some of the saddest and the happiest.
Is it contentment?
It also knows no color, no rank, no age, and no gender.
Is it repose?
It sounds indefinable, but it is not.
It just passes all understanding.
The definition?
Peace is the fruit of intimate communion with Jesus Christ.
Anything else that masquerades as peace is false, will fall, will fail, will fly away.
Facts are: Constantly working hard to capture all the runaway part of your own self-manufactured peace and keep them somehow glued together
is not a very peaceful existence.
Getting the Prince of Peace to do it for you is—mmm—peaceful.
He just gives us peace, His peace.
Of course, such a great gift would be wrapped and need to be unwrapped
before we could use it, right?
The wrapping is Jesus, Himself, and the unwrapping is as easy as letting go—
and as difficult.
Actually, this gift is a trade.
We give up our own peace and trade it to Him for His peace,
as when we trade in a bent and sweaty ticket for the ride, itself.
And He paid for the ticket.
And our hands were what bent and soiled it.
So simple, some people let it insult them.
Some people are so accustomed to a difficult peace
that they disdain something so simple.
Joi and her husband were poor. He was a sacker in a small grocery while she raised their four children in a two-bedroom house and they both worked on college degrees at the same time.
Although we were good friends, Joi was a constant source of inadequacy in me. Her scratch cooking, home canning, crocheted doilies, and hand-sewn quilts, all worked on my sense of accomplishment. She would even blend soy beans in her blender for soy milk.
And then turned it into ice cream.
How did she always fill the gaps among their possessions with cheer? How did she know all about healthful eating before the age of computers? How did she know about herbal healing before the herbal renaissance? How play piano beautifully? I would never catch up!
The day came when Joi and her husband completed their degrees and moved to the land of employment. I lost touch with her, but not exactly; I still can feel Joi’s cheer in my life.
One time, for my birthday, she brought me a huge surprise. Simple and cherishable, just like Joi, the gift brought me happiness, that day. Enveloped in kitchen linens was an enormous steaming loaf of bread. You’ve never seen one that big. I was so excited. With it was a bag of spinach from her own garden, immaculately cleaned.
What fun we had loving that sweet gift to pieces, literally! These delicious additions to my birthday supper may seem like an odd gift to you, but Joi knew what it would mean to us, and we saw the love in it.
If I had washed and washed a big bag of spinach and then given it away I’d be missing it. But Joi just smiled her cheery best. If I’d had the aromas of homemade bread floating through my house, for naught, if I’d known that bread was going to someone else’s house, I’d have handed it over very longingly, not cheerily like Joi.
In a way, you could say Joi was the gift.
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